Beyond the federal scope, on the state level, there is a lack of formal protections in place for the LGBTQ community.

According to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), there are currently 28 states in the U.S. that do not have any specific state employment nondiscrimination law that covers sexual orientation or gender identity. (You can check this link from MAP to see whether or not your state has protections for LGBTQ people.)

Take, for example, South Carolina, where Lindsey, a 32-year-old woman, recently moved with her fiancée, Grace. Lindsey received a job offer in February to be an occupational therapist at a local hospital. But when she read the fine print of the job’s benefits package, she discovered that under the terms of the employer, her fiancée would not be covered under the employer-offered health insurance. The benefits information qualified that the insurance covered only dependent children and an opposite-sex spouse.

“I was floored,” Lindsey tells Teen Vogue. “If I hadn’t read the fine print, I would have been screwed.”

In these 28 states, someone who is LGBTQ can be fired. And in many of them, an LGBTQ person could be denied housing, denied a line of credit or use of a lending service, denied employment for state jobs, or refused entry to or service by businesses or banks or parks, all due to their orientation or identity. And 50% of the nation’s LGBTQ population live in states that do not have sufficient laws in place to block this kind of discrimination.

“It's incredibly sad to me that these are things we have to worry about in 2017,” Grace, Lindsey's fiancée, tells Teen Vogue.

Missouri Democratic State Rep. Peter Merideth spoke with Teen Vogue about what is happening in his state, where the government in March passed a bill that will make it difficult for LGBTQ people and other protected classes to prove employment discrimination and also will disallow state employees from receiving financial damages in discrimination or harassment lawsuits.

“Republican leadership didn't even allow a vote on an amendment to add protections for our LGBTQ neighbors who face discrimination daily,” he says.

Katie Stuckenschneider, the communications director for PROMO, a Missouri organization that advocates for LGBTQ people through legislative action and electoral politics, tells Teen Vogue that 2017 was the 19th year in which some form of the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act (MONA) was introduced in the Missouri legislature. If passed, it would add sexual orientation and gender identity to Missouri’s Human Rights Act.

“Passing MONA is long overdue,” she says. “Missourians are being actively fired for being LGBTQ.”

Farther west, in California, according to MAP, nearly 5% of the 30 million adults living the state identify as LGBTQ — and 30% of that LGBTQ population are raising children. In terms of state-sanctioned rights, California is one of the more progressive states for LGBTQ people to live. But still, there is currently no law in place that protects from nondiscrimination in credit and lending for LGBTQ Californians.

Petey Gibson, a writer-performer-comedian who has performed on Amazon’s Golden Globe–winning Transparent, lives in L.A. with their wife, where they also serve as a youth mentor with the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center. “What these lack of protections [throughout the U.S.] do is devastating,” they said.

“To be told by your own country that you are not as worthy, or that, being yourself means you can be kicked out of your home, fired, or publicly humiliated, continues to take great tolls on our community, our mental health, and our feelings of self-worth. LGBTQ+ youth are fed the direct line that they do not matter as much, and that line of thinking in a community with such high self-harm and suicide rates is truly criminal.”

According to CDC data analyzed by the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), suicide rates are higher in some states that lack LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections than in those states that have them. For instance, the suicide rates among all residents (not just LGBTQ persons) in the states of Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi are estimated to be 15.1%, as reported by the AAS. Each of these states lacks nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. The suicide rates in some states where there are nondiscrimination protections, such as Nevada and New York, are substantially lower, at a rate of 12.3% and 8.5%, respectively. (Teen Vogue did not find any studies that pointed to a direct correlation between nondiscrimination laws and suicide rates.)

Historically, housing rights have been a major struggle for the LGBTQ community, but in April they saw a big win when U.S. District Judge Raymond P. Moore in Denver ruled, for the very first time, that LGBTQ people are protected under the Federal Fair Housing Act, a decision made after a woman and her transgender wife were denied a rental property due to their “unique relationship” (as they claimed in court that their landlord called it). Now, on a federal level, it is illegal to discriminate against an LGBTQ person when it comes to housing. That said, certainly discrimination still takes place. Some states can have stricter rules when it comes to housing and other issues — think loopholes that make abortion and gun control hard or easy on a state-by-state basis — but ultimately, federal rulings supersede state rulings. It became the law of the land.

Travis Avery, a trans man and a California resident, is a counselor at Brave Trails, a camp that caters to LGBTQ youth. He told Teen Vogue that the next generation gives him great hope. “I've met youth that live in states that are constantly trying to invalidate and disprove their existence. And these youth still rise up and organize marches, they rally on social media, and they inform the masses about the issues.”

In Texas, a grassroots progressive group, Pride of East Texas, organized a rally to be held on Tuesday, July 18, to protest the state’s proposed “bathroom bill”, which will be voted on during the state’s special legislative session.

The bill aims to “regulate bathroom use and keep transgender Texans from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity,” according to The Texas Tribune. It was introduced by Texas state lawmakers early this year and failed to pass when it was voted on in regular legislative session, which ended May 29.

In addition to the negative ways in which the passage of the bill would affect the LGBTQ community, it has been noted that the bill could negatively affect Texas’s economy, potentially costing the state an estimated $3 billion per year, according to one study, due to loss of tourism and events revenue. North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” has been estimated to cost the state $3.76 billion in lost business, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.